Where weird shit hits bizarre fans.

Month

September 2015

This isn’t necessarily about Ghostbusters or even feminism really, it’s more about labelling or branding or signalling I guess.

It’s become apparent even more so recently at the time I wrote this sketch that feminism is ‘In’ now, what do I mean by that, I mean all the airheads of Hollywood and all these American hives of scum and villainy and really really fucking white teeth have adopted this ‘mantra’, for lack of a better word.

And I understand why, it sounds nice right, if you’re a woman it means you support women’s rights yada yada yada, if you’re a man it means women think you’re sensitive and you get more pussy as if guys in Hollywood need more pussy (maybe with the exception of Will Wheaton, I know he has a wife, I just don’t think she’s smart enough to work her vagina, I’m not even sure he’s in Hollywood).

It’s just like when celebs open charities or politicians have photo-ops to make them seem ‘hip’ or ‘in touch with the people’ it doesn’t really mean anything. It’s just branding, you’re trying to package yourself to a demographic you think wants to hear this load of bullshit that makes them feel good and in turn makes them feel good about you.

That’s not to say that some don’t care about the charities they work on or they don’t genuinely believe feminism is beneficial to mankind. I’m not trying to say it’s all about attention or getting people to like you, I’m just saying a lot of it is that, because to declare yourself a feminist has to come with a lot of caveats.

Saying you’re a feminist, really doesn’t mean a lot because there are so many different kinds, it’s like saying you’re a christian, well that’s great but what kind of christian are you?

What I mean by it taking a very surface level involvement is that they hear feminism is about ‘equality’ and who isn’t down for equality? You’d have to be a complete asshole to have a microphone and a camera shoved in your face and tell people you don’t believe in equality. It’s like someone puts a gun at your head and says “Are you or have you ever been a member of the communist party?”

I’ve seen a lot of this, it’s as if an ideology has gone through a viral marketing campaign, where they’ve given it a bit of a makeover and are now shoving it into people’s faces for some reason.

“Nazism, it’s about protecting the purity of the white race, through cuddles and NUSSING ELSE!”

Because on the surface it’s all rainbows and sunshine and ‘equality’ and happiness and fair pay and all that good stuff, but below that its’ very different. So when someone comes up to you on the street or if you’re a celebrity they stick a microphone in your face and say ‘Are you a feminist?’ what they’re actually asking is ‘Are you or have you ever been a shitlord?’

And to the average person they’ll say ‘no’ because they’ll think of it as this activism movement that you actually have to be a part of like the communist party and you’ll have to wear stupid shirts and die your hair green. But the definition in this new marketing campaign has become so broad you and your dog are now feminists. People who are dead are fucking feminists posthumously. They couldn’t wait a day after Leonard Nemoy died before they cited him saying something nice about women somewhere and claiming him as one of their own like Mitt Romney baptising his dead father in law into mormonism in the basement of his creepy mormon church in a pool of yaks piss under a statue of a gold bull or whatever. It’s that fucking weird.

It’s trying to grow by obscuring the facts, by spreading the ‘dictionary definition’ very thin and with shitloads, I mean fucking bucket loads of no true Scotsman fallacies to cover up all the nasty pr disasters that occur in their name.

And they love to trot out this dictionary definition and say it means ‘Equality’ well it doesn’t, we already have a word for that, it’s called ‘Egalitarian’, feminism actually says equality for women but since we’re going by dictionary definitions.

Communism

[kom-yuh-niz-uh m]

noun

1.

a theory or system of social organization based on the holding of all property in common, actual ownership being ascribed to the community as a whole or to the state.

Doesn’t sound too bad does it, if you side step the mountain of corpses.

North Korea, according to the ever so insightful and reliable wikipedia, it officially states that North Korea is a Democratic People’s Republic, hmm.

Islam is a religion of peace, christianity is about love, scientology is about… err something good, you get the picture, it’s almost like these things are not what they appear to be on paper.

It’s almost like something can be different than what it ascribes to be, huh??

The reason they use the blanket term is because it’s so general, there’s no way you could disagree with ‘equality’ you can’t it’s impossible, you’d have to be fucking Skeletor living in a castle made of dicks to say you don’t support equality even a little bit.

So using that false definition and this sort of social pressure bullying they cast a net and try to force this dogma into the mainstream of culture, I’m not saying it’s not mainstream; it certainly is on the surface level. They tout their wage gap myths and their rape statistics and their number of female directors and all this confirmation bias and nonsense and it gets some nodding heads and confirmation bias is shared by all, everyone who doesn’t want to think about it is happy go home. But if you don’t agree well then twitter is your deathbed buddy, you then become Skeletor in the confines of the internet, burn the internet, because everyone fat woman with blue hair is Heman on anti-depressants.

I don’t even know what I’m really trying to say, I guess I just like thinking my own thoughts and having my own opinions. The idea that someone can just shove an ideology in your face and then brand you a bigot for just not wanting to associate yourself with something that comes with so much unseen baggage, is ludicrous. It essentially comes down to ‘Agree with me or die’ which is pretty much the stance of every conquering religion ever devised.

I’ve been trying my hand at writing prose recently and I thought I’d use this place as a bit of a sound board maybe, up my content at least, I’ll be posting it on Inkitt too, so these posts aren’t too long, and it keeps the chapters in order the link is at the bottom. Thanks for checking it out, I’ll post chapters intermittently throughout the month. Cheers.

The wind blew through the cherry blossoms in the Sakuragoaka gardens. Musashi knelt and cleared his mind, letting his cares drift on with that wind that blew the trees. He saw without seeing as he closed his eyes, his mind clacking in the dark of his dreams, sparking silently as he smelled the fires burning in the distance, food cooking in the town over, dogs’ barks travelling over the mountains, whispers in the cool afternoon air carried by the silence of the coming night.

The ground he knelt on was soft and grass stained his dark brown robes, he hadn’t washed for days or combed his hair. Cleanliness had become a pretence he didn’t much care for.

Suddenly the air became tighter and sharper and pin pricks of air hit his skin. His eyes cracked and let in some light as his mind came soaring back like a demon raking up the pits of hell, as it hurtled into this world. A foot touched down on the grassy earth and sent shockwaves through the ground and then another and another and another and another and another.

Three sets of two, his eyes closed again as he listened, three men or one six legged demon, he’d know only when he cut it, they’d only exist when his blade touched them and then only for a moment after.

He took a deep slow inhalation of breath as they approached, steel breathed out sharply as their swords loosened from their ramshackle sheathes; the air took on the smell of iron and copper; they approached from behind as Musashi meditated; their steel quivered as the light hit the blade; he could see it in his mind’s eye, feel them slowly oxidising.

With each step their hearts beat faster and lost more ground to his own steady beat; his heart beat like a leather drum of a mighty ship approaching a certain destination.

His attackers could feel it in the ground as they got closer to him; the vibrations through their feet made them feel numb and light headed, they lost the tip of their swords to a strange feeling of giddiness as they got close to the kneeling man.

His breathing remained steady and smooth; he breathed in deeply, taking in the last of the sweet smells of the cherry blossom tree; the pink petals fell and swayed on the wind. Musashi brought his sword forward in his waist wrap and turned the blade in its scabbard pushing out his bottom lip as he did. His grizzled lower jaw cocked to the side as he felt the greasy stubble on his face with his other hand. He sighed a little as he turned the blade up in his belt and slowly pushed the hilt, gently popping the blade from the sheathe with a slight jerking motion from his thumb, the blade sticking with the coming cold of the autumn months.

The blank figures flapped slightly as the sails of a ship in a changing wind and their nerves were caught on a wire, cutting deeply as they sprang into life having come too close to turn back. Their fear pushed them onto this mortal stage to face blood and sweat and bone and will in an afternoon showing only the sky would be far away enough to enjoy.

They tense their legs and took stances each similar and dissimilar from each other, trying to gain strength from the earth that bore them vagabonds. They swallowed and took their pride up like an iron flag and bound towards the old man resting his eyes in the cool breeze, listening to the gears of the world slowly turn, smelling the sweet and tart smells of the grass and the blossoms mixing in the dying evening over the hushed voices of careless people.

Their swords were heavier than his and they bolted unsteadily forward shaking like they were held together with string, his sword was that of a dancing feather and cut through the air like a blossom from the cherry tree. His hand had barely touched the sword; his grip was light and nourished the blade with his will; it stayed straight and did not falter in the wind; it moved with it, flowed on it and cut it like a ship parts waves. A natural exhilaration of what was meant to be; men travelling towards their destinies, whatever that may amount to.

The men set up on him, their movements that of men underwater encountering a great eye seeing all their movements but recognising them only as insignificant shapes in the dark depth of a boundless ocean. His mind only thought of cutting, his blade sharpened by his burning will, a searing desire to be seen by the ambivalent god of the moon and stars.

They scattered like leaves; their bodies wanted to be cut; they were made complete by his blade, a cut for each and each in place; not a drop of blood fell until it was ready to fall and Musashi sheathed his sword once more.

Suddenly as if from the sky itself a crack appeared and Musashi felt a foot on his shadow, a tightness in his chest as his guard had been penetrated by some unholy force; he quickly drew his sword again; it was already halfway out when he heard it’s scream tear through the heavens, a star falling with the force of the earth itself, eclipsed him like an insect in the wake of a great mountain.

“TJ STOP SCREWING AROUND IN THE YARD AND TAKE OUT THE TRASH!”

“MOOOM, I’M FILMING FOR YOUTUBE!”

“-AND YOU BETTER NOT BE PUTTING HOLES IN MY FENCE WITH THAT SWORD!”

“NO MOM”.

TJ sighed heavily as he looked at the jagged cut in the water cooler bottle he picked up on his way home from school; it bled out on the unevenly cut grass as his fantasy faded into the corners of his mind. He scratched his neckbeard as he looked at his crappy mall katana sticking out of fence that ran around the back of his back garden, still twitching from the force of the swing. He must have let go when his mom called him.

He looked into his digital camera and sighed audibly into the vacant lens.

“Hey fat ass” A nasally voice rang out from over the fence and TJ turned like Michael Jackson in thriller.

“Yeah you, neck beard, over here” His neighbour leant on the fence that parted their gardens like a crow with a superior sneer sitting atop his pointy douche bag goatee looking like a hipster Ming the merciless with a pair of poser shades dangling from his fingers over the fence.

“You better watch it son, you almost put another hole in my ass with that pig sticker of yours, hommie doesn’t play that, my exit hole remains an exit hole feel me?” His neighbour flailed his sunglasses in his fingers and tried to sound like a black guy for some reason.

“Err Wut?”

“What are you doing man? No one wants to see some fat re-re in his mommies yard cutting up bottles with a butter knife when they can see handsome motherfuckers like me and my associates chopping on some real meat with some big… mmm weapons!” He smiled and motioned with his sunglasses at TJ’s camera set up and his bottle massacre, sneering and preening in one self satisfied breathe.

TJ averted his gaze as he attempted to jossle his sword free from the fence, his pits were wet and stinging, shame and anger swelling as he said nothing and shook his head from side to side trying to get his emo black bangs out of his sweaty face, he just took it.

“Stay off my fucking youtube asshat, and keep that mall sword crap in your pants.” He hopped off the fence laughing.

“Now where the fuck were we? Oh yeah” He said as he turned to the camera as it focused on his goateed smug face, putting his sunglasses back on; He slicked his floppy black hair back on his head.

I wanted to blog about the first issue of Three Ring Samurai and Bat Country in more detail but I think I’ll tackle them separately and talk more broadly on how I feel about first issues because I find I feel quite strongly about them.

To me the first issue of a comic is like an introduction to an essay or a film or anything of that nature, it sets up the plot but it also has to stand almost on its own. I read so many indie comics who see the first issue as almost a hurdle to be jumped as swiftly and as neatly as possible to get to the ‘good bits’ but if you have ‘good bits’ why aren’t they in the first issue people will see?
You have to give people a reason to want to get to the ‘good bits’, I’m not going to read your entire graphic novel and then decide whether or not it was worth my time at the end. I’m going to see what the first issue is telling me and decide from that moment whether to keep reading or not.

So in my mind the first issue should almost encapsulate everything you want to say or achieve throughout the entire comic. It’s not the start of a story, it IS the whole story. I read quite a few comics that start at the beginning despite nothing really happening, and slowly building to that point.

A comic is not like a novel, you have to grab people’s attention as soon as possible or you’ll never have it. I’d structure it so it started at or after the inciting incident and work backwards, it’s a common device but that’s because it works and if you think you can’t make a common device work for you or you can’t make something like that fresh and exciting or scoff at cliché’s you really shouldn’t be a writer. Because that’s all we do, nothing is original, nothing is new, everything is a cliché, we’ve been on this planet for thousands of years as a species, we have to keep recycling and keep mixing things up to keep… LIFE interesting. It’s not what you write about, its how you write about it that makes what you do interesting.
Now my post apocalyptic diesel punk samurai clown epic, Three Ring Samurai, if I may be so modest has an oddly modest first issue in comparison from where the story goes. I see the premise, and the elevator pitch alone is incredibly flamboyant and done by anyone else it would too silly, too wacky and just wouldn’t work. I wanted to go for a more anime like feel, where there can be silliness and there can be wackiness but you always understand that there are real world consequences and life and death and it’ll be at its core a serious story because in my opinion those are the stories I like and want to tell.

I think seriousness and sadness and humour work off each other well and in some instances deepen eachother. It’s like twin peaks, again; you have all this wackiness going on in the episode but by the end you have to remember that Laura is dead and that’s what the show is about, it’s a comedy surrounding a tragedy and only the end can truly define where the pointer lands.

So with the first issue I really wanted to undersell it and be as subtle as I possibly could so that I could contain the bombastic title and concept and really blue ball the reader, as well as giving them a little something that would make them want to read the next issue (which is still being drawn) and give them a feel for the tone of entire series.

I really had to restrain myself because the concept is so rich and so fucking explosive, it’s almost too tempting to take it and run and just burn yourself out. But I wanted a really plodding and structured approach. And I know I said I hated comics that took a long time to get going but I think this comic had enough momentum behind it in terms of interest with the unique subject matter to cut me a little slack if just for the first issue. To be a little mysterious, a little enigmatic even in a comic that is so tongue in cheek at its core as this.

So the first page, I read that and I hear Ron Perlman’s voice saying ‘War, war never changes’, and I just can’t resist, the zoom out on the post apocalyptic setting, I really wanted to give a feel of scope and loss with the idea that people were still clinging on to something which is Fallout at its heart.

We’re introduced to these two kids, like the wastelands answer to tin tin, two innocents bounding onto some dark strange discovery and this is how we’re introduced to our hero. I tried to use this to set the tone in terms of the fact the kids didn’t find it strange to find a dead body, the light normality of death being so prevalent in a harsh wasteland.

Pookie is almost like an alien or a baby or a fish wacked on the head and brought back to life. With the scenes of the shack, I almost wanted a sleepy feel, a sort of cool peace that fell on the wasteland at dusk in contrast to the chaos of the day.

I had a lot of fun with the kids, sneaking in exposition and building up to the character of Pookie by essentially mocking him in this cartoony anime sort of way. I want him to be this figure of fun, a silly character that can fall on his ass and make a fool of himself because he’s not afraid of being a fool because he knows when it comes down to it, he’ll have the last laugh.

The grandpa character is a sort of wily comic relief, someone to bounce weird jokes off the kids (fuck just noticed a spelling mistake haha). Someone who plays dumb to lull people into a false sense of security but secretly knows more than he lets on. And then we can have this hushed voices real talk between him and Pookie, nods and gestures of two people in tune in some way.

The dream sequences are something I plucked directly from the opening sequence of David Lynch’s Elephantman. I wanted something surreal but also very silly, and I really can’t get away with genuine serious surrealism. I’ve always been more drawn to comedy surrealism like Luis Bunuel and to some extent David Lynch, I find he takes his surrealism (besides possibly Eraserhead, that movie freaks a lot of people out but I found it quite silly and funny in a way) very lightly and with many pinches of salt.

I think if I remember correctly, the reason I made it elephants is mainly because I loved the way Ike (The artist) drew the elephant on the opening page and then I took the opening sequence from David Lynch’s Elephantman, which is a pretty fucking weird intro and ran with it. I’m pretty sure it’s an elephant rape scene, or that’s at least what he’s hinting at, I wouldn’t put that past him to be fair, he’s done weirder shit than that.

I shamelessly stole the Musashi joke from Champloo. I have no shame, it’s just too funny and I read the book of the five rings before I started writing this, so why the fuck not?

We’re introduced to Pookie in earnest, I always like characters with silly names, it almost makes it twice as amazing when they do something incredible, I almost wish I came up with it but I think that was all Ike as is the original concept.

Only 11 pages in do we get to the meat of the story. Pookie has been robbed and the natural imperative of gramps is just to let it go, some stuff isn’t worth your life and Pookie is injured, but Pookie is not like them. Someone takes something from him, he gets it back. He is almost an alien, dropped into a dog eat dog world with an inordinately large set of teeth. This is where I like to think I injected some of the Cain in Kung Fu elements I wanted to bring forward. A lone wanderer, from a strange culture, a warrior with incredible skill plucked out of a fantasy; an almost mockery to human potential, an anime character walking Deus Ex Machina.

The main purpose of this issue is that Pookie was essentially destroyed, his life, his past. He was killed, reborn and everything he knew stripped away from him. So now he has to find himself, he has to decide who he is in this new world, without the world he’d come to know. The first thing he’s drawn to is his sword and violence because that’s all he’d known all his life.

In a lot of ways this is a coming of age story, someone thrown out of their old life like Kung Fu and thrust into a strange new world, forced to make sense of who he has to become to survive.

This whole issue is essentially about Pookie’s rebirth (fuck that’s pretentious), he’s trying to establish who he really is, because for so long he was one thing (no spoilers); it was his whole world, his identity and in one moment it’s taken from him and now he has to re-establish his identity and who he is as a character. As a writer it was and is a tricky character to write for because he’s almost forming himself with every page, piecing himself together like Doctor Manhattan.

I’m oddly proud of the sword, a sword with a handle like one of those cheesy laughing boxes Jack Nicholson joker has at the end of Batman. He always gets the last laugh even if he dies. I sort of wanted to mock the idea of swords in general.

A katana is as clichéd as you can get these days, so saturated in popular culture. I wanted to make his sword out to be some ridiculous piece of joke shop crap, a silly show piece, a gimmick for laughs, a sword that laughs for a man that doesn’t need to.

It’s also sort of homage to my early knife collection. I bought this crappy machete from Doncaster market when I was like 13 I think. It had a dragon or lions head handle with glowing led’s for eyes that lit up when you pressed a button, jesus what the fuck was I thinking?

The combat I wanted to keep as theatrical as possible, death is a show, it had to be fairly flash but also brutally inefficient. He’s a monster, a vicious killer, who expects applause for his butchery, someone shaped by the brutality of the vicious curiosity of a bloodthirsty crowd egging him on to further heights of gut-wrenching violence. To him violence and killing is a parlour trick, it’s almost a joke, like hitting someone in the face with a custard pie.

That’s how I wanted to capture this element of silliness in this very grotesque and ultra-violent package. I really wanted to hone that feeling of 80’s action movie ultra-violence, like Robocop. Someone is torn apart in this ridiculously over the top death sequence but it’s wrapped up in this really silly camp vibe that makes it all the more sinister and weird.

Ok maybe the ending with the cheesy ‘see ya around kid’ was a little too much but I couldn’t resist. I wanted to end it in a way that made it uncertain where he was going, he was just going somewhere, anywhere to forge a new Pookie, one that followed his own rules and didn’t need no stinkin’ circus.

Well how did I do? haha. Fuck I waffled on like a man possessed, if you read this far through I commend you.

All in all not a lot happens but I think it’s a tight and tidy package, I’ve got a handful of positive reviews for it under my belt already and I feel confident it was a solid first issue. but it gives enough, succinctly I think, to grab the attention for another issue or two.

It sounds more and more pretentious every time I say it but one of my biggest influences when I write right now and in the creative process in general is David Lynch.

Which is odd to say it’s pretentious because Lynch’s work, I find remarkably unpretentious, so distinctly odd without necessarily trying to be, just unrestrainedly uncommon and intriguing. Every one of his films and Twin Peaks is almost like someone took the idea of film making or a tv show and handed it to an Alien and he made his own interpretation that was like what had come before but so drastically but indescribably different. Something you just couldn’t put your finger on but it was rolling around in your brain itching in the corners of your eyes and just couldn’t get it.

I’m not a lifelong fan, I had seen the Elephantman and Dune but I think I was too young to have been caught up in Twin Peaks at the time of its release and those two movies are probably the worst ones to watch in retrospect. Both films are constrained by one being true and the other being based on a sci-fi novel.

So he slipped through the cracks, while I was quite happy with my Tarantino’s and my Scorcese’s and whomever else grazed my adolescent movie palate.

Until I saw a film that really struck an odd note with me that sticks with me even now and no it wasn’t actually by David Lynch *plot twist* it was by Jennifer Lynch, his talented daughter. The movie was called Surveillance, a really haunting off kilter thriller, I love even to this day. But what really stuck with me was the sound track.

The music was haunting and jarring and really something else, I couldn’t help tracking down the soundtrack and finding my favourite song from the film which was called ‘Speed Roadster’ written and performed by… David Lynch.
Who was this alternative/electro/country sounding singer I’d never heard of but couldn’t get enough of; oh what he’s the director’s father? And he’s a writer/director (/among other things, painter/actor) as well? Wow.

Then rather ashamedly I started to put together the dots and I had heard a lot of talk about I think True Detective and how it was ‘like twin peaks’ which in some respects is true. It does capture that haunting sorrow of the unavoidable nature of life and the boundless horror of the unknown (a little Lovecraftian in that respect too, despite it being based on the Yellow King mythos). I may be rewriting my own history here, I can’t be sure, so instead of watching True Detective I watched Twin Peaks (And then eventually True detective) and I was captivated, a little bored/confused at times but I had to keep watching.

There was just something about it, something that made me want to laugh but also cry bitterly and it held me in this state between sorrow and a drunk sort of happiness and each emotion seemed to feed off the other and deepen, the depths of the humour dug larger holes for the sorrow to hide and when the credits rolled over Laura’s face you remembered why you were here.

Frankly I was amazed that such a compelling show could be written about one murder, I can hardly concentrate long enough through an episode of csi or the walking dead where the cast drops like flies.

It was amazing that one fictional person’s life could touch so many people in so many different ways and although she wasn’t technically a character, Laura was the show.

So I initially got into David Lynch not even knowing he made films or tv shows, I just thought he was a weird old guy that made cool music. I loved introducing my brother to Lynch because we watched all his films together and I can’t remember if we watched the Twin Peaks movie Fire walk with me first or not but he hadn’t seen the show before watching. There’s this bit where some weird shit happens and my brother turns to me expecting me to know what the fuck it means because I watched the show and I was like; ‘Dude, I don’t fucking know’ and it was pretty funny.
I was told it didn’t matter if you watched the movie or the show first but I’m glad I watched the show first because it completely depicts Laura’s murder, something I think should never have been done.

In the classic Poe style mystery, the greatest mysteries are the ones that go unsolved.

But producers and ratings and money and bing bang boom, they ruined the whole mystery and then the show limped on after until it eventually keeled over with the help of Billy Zane??

Season 2 in my opinion is a complete clusterfuck, I hold out hope for the reboot, but I intend to keep my expectations as low as possible and coddle myself in the warm embrace of my favourite Lynch films, Blue Velvet being one.

The thing that separates Lynch from any other of my influences is that I not only learnt a lot about story telling from him but also about the creative process in general. I think it’s in a Tom Waits song (Of which the name escapes me) where he says David Lynch told him that he had to sit in a comfy chair and close his eyes and wait for the big one to come along.

Although he may have been alluding to his transcendental meditation woo of which I am not subscribed (I can sit in a chair with my eyes closed without paying like ten quid a month to some swami or whatever) as a fan of Lovecraft this struck a chord with me.

There’s a part of me that is deeply sceptical of woo, all things woo but there’s another part that believes that stories are located in a river in a different dimension and when we close our eyes and concentrate we can catch the odd big fish.
All stories are essentially the same in structure but the core principals of the story come from somewhere else, they’re pieced together from dreams and movies and conversations and some ultra-terrestrial other or just plain pulled out of your ass.

But sometimes I can’t help feeling that I’m not creating stories, I’m just uncovering something that was already there or giving life to something long dead and that makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, despite it most likely being bullshit it gives me a nice Lovecraft boner, like I’m in my own story and some ungodly horror is going to burst into the room and tentacle rape me.. what was that noise? On the stairs, it can’t be…*gasp* my eyes, my ey..*indiscernible screaming*.

Not to be Debbie-downer over here, it’s not the best subject for a comic strip, but after the Charlestown/ton (I could google the right spelling but I don’t give enough of a shit) shooting, the scrambling all over my facebook page was just too delicious not to comment on.

As a not well known giver of fucks, I was happy to write off this shooter as the Gilbert Grape (Yeah I can’t remember if he was DiCaprio’s character or Depp’s and I don’t give a shit, you know what I mean, the retarded one, google it, fuck!), inbred looking motherfucker he was and just say; the kid was a few coconuts short of a spongecake and be done with it. Shuffle the deck, say something reassuring to the people and then go on our merry way pretending this would never happen again.
Of course it’ll happen again, crazy gonna cray’, it’s like trying to stop the tide coming in. We’re little insects shoving each other into these little roach motels, trying to pretend that every human being on earth has their own individual worth. To paraphrase fight club really badly; we all think we’re going to be rock stars and movie stars and we’re gonna fuck super models and drive flashy cars, but its bullshit.

And when people realise how insignificant they really are they want to prove themselves wrong and do fucked up shit like this, to feel powerful, to let everyone know and even themselves that they were indeed alive.

I’m not gonna sit here and say it’s ‘society’s’ fault and I’m sure as shit not gonna blame masculinity or racism (not to completely discount them) and then slap on some voodoo hoodoo snake oil instant fix, a la ‘get rid of guns’ or something else that wouldn’t work.

I just felt like I needed to point out how fucking carnivorous our culture is today that when some lunatic, some idiot, shoots innocent people, the first thing people try to do is blame it on something that propels their pet project.

‘Oh I really don’t like the confederate flag, I think it represents *insert negative connotations here*, oh this crazy guy had it in a photo and he shot people, I can use this to ban it’.

‘What about all the people that have photos taken with it, that don’t shoot people, which are definitely the majority? Look I found a picture of him with a my little pony poster in the background’

‘Wut are you some kind of white supremacist capitalist shitlord??’

(I wait with baited breathe for the day a bronie goes on a killing spree)

I’m not saying the confederate flag doesn’t represent racism, I’m not American and I don’t give a shit, it could be Michael Barrymore’s bath towel for all I care. As far as the interactions I’ve had with it, it seemed like a fairly quaint and idealized symbol of southern American heritage and I associated it with country singers and impractical cars and caravans and terrible hairstyles that defied time periods.

I took it for what it was; just another outdated signpost that didn’t really mean anything until someone wanted to push some agenda.

I have nothing against taking the flag down because I don’t care, what I really have a problem with is this culture of hashtagtivism that just does… stuff. It’s just this opinionated blob of entitled placenta propelling themselves with their own brainfarts to push some bullshit agenda and make their balls/clits swell feeling some modicum of power by combining their butthurt and getting something/anything banned for the ‘THE GREATER GOOD’. As if these nuanceless fucks would know ‘good’ if it slapped its balls against their foreheads.

It’s why I didn’t support the gay marriage thing, I’m not against it, I just don’t give a shit, these movements become less about ‘equality’ and ‘justice’ and more about getting your own way and telling everyone how ‘progressive’ you are while you do it. This whole culture has become a fucking toddler who looks for every opportunity to stomp it’s feet and hold it’s breathe until it’s provided with cake and ice cream. (Yeah I get that’s what I’m basically doing, no fuck you, I saw it first)

And this to me was another example of that.

My facebook feed was just a constant stream of white knights prostrating themselves as if this retard represented all of us and we’d all been complicit and needed to apologise and get ‘I’m not racist, really’ tattooed on the side of our heads. Another gripe I had with the gay marriage thing was the prostration of people on facebook with that fucking rainbow profile pic thing, just a massive sign on your facebook page ‘I don’t hate faggots’, no one said you did asshole.

Side stepping that, the point I was trying to make was, that this shooting was caused by racism, if you completely lack any sense of nuance at all. If you take out context and any sort of nuance you can look in his room and find a NIN album and blame it on that, maybe he played candy crush and the black candies enraged him. The Christians were saying it was an atheist attack on the church, the gun haters were blaming guns, the race baiters were blaming racists, the feminists were blaming all men, it was a clusterfuck of stupid assholes all chomping at the bit to claim a killer to push their own nuanceless agenda. And it solves nothing but to give these opportunist assholes more power and more money.

Because when you’re trying to push an agenda, you need to focus on that one thing, it can’t be race and mental health, it can’t be toxic masculinity and gun control, it has to be one thing so you can push a solid narrative and get people on board because people en masse don’t like nuance. Having to deal with more than one issue is just too complicated, he couldn’t have been racist and crazy because that stigmatises people who lie about being mentally ill because they claim to be ‘random’ or ‘quirky’.

But hey ho when a gay black guy shoots two white people it’s suddenly, ‘He was mentally unstable’ yeah we know, he shot two people, not many sane people do that. We don’t turn around and say it was because he hated white people or straight people, it could have been the case but I think any sane person would agree it was because he was fucking crazy. He’s not a ‘misogynist’ because he shot a woman; he’s not a ‘racist’ because he shot someone of a different race. He’s a fucking nut job because he shot two innocent people for no fucking reason. And yeah maybe if it was harder for him to get a gun, he’d be a slightly more frustrated crazy person that killed them with a spork and that would be much messier.

What’s the moral of the story? I know I hate this because without actually raising a solution I’m just whining and that makes me no better than social justice whiners hashtagtivist slacktavists but there is no solution, there is no problem. Any student of history can see people are not these docile cow like beings that just chew cud and mill about, we’re vicious little cunts and we’re just settling in to being somewhat socialized, the most benign of domesticated dogs can sometimes bite, a church going mother of six can drown them all in a bathtub.

This is a fucked up world and it’s the people that try to convince you otherwise that think anything can be done. Nothing can be done, because there’s nothing wrong, people have been killing people since they discovered rocks were heavy and brains were squishy. Despite that the murder rate has been the lowest it’s ever been and it’s decreasing, will it ever be zero? No. Would less mass shootings be nice? Yes, would an ice-cream covered unicorn at my birthday party be awesome? That’s just impractical.

There’s nothing that can be done, look at it logically, what solution have people posed? Remove a flag. What will that do exactly? Will it decrease racism or piss off real racists and people who just like the flag? Will it stop shootings or will it profile people who use the flag?

I know this makes people ‘feel’ good, like they’re making a difference, making the world a better place, gives them a raging boner and a little surge of power like they aren’t just sacks of meat on sticks on a ball of dirt, their actions are recorded on twitter for a whole hour. But for the realists like me, the world is and has always been a steaming pile of shit and we are the lucky insects squirming through that mound of warm universal dung savouring all the sights and sounds and smells rushing towards infinity and with that sophistic bullshit I am done.

Also I imdb’d What’s eating Gilbert Grape and DiCaprio’s character was called ‘Arnie’, I dare anyone to say this blog isn’t informative, fucking haters. Peace!